Took the plunge, I have been saving for quite some time.. I have upgraded the weapon. I now am the excited owner of a Canon T2i. For pros, they'll still chuckle a little, but I don't care. Max ISO increase from 1600 to 12800. Eighteen megapixel, versus my Rebel XT, which is an iffy 8 megapixel. Fifteen years of product design and engineering better. Also paired it with the pro version of my favorite lens, the nifty fifty, in an even larger and better built f/1.4.

The manager of the store asked what my goals were, which led to giving the guy the nickel version of my situation. He cut me some awesome deals by the end, I have essentially replaced the key portions of my camera system, a professional backdrop (needed badly), reflectors and diffusers, remote trigger, and a desperately needed media drive for the computer, USB Seagate 1.5TB (a hundred bucks!) media drive for my photos.. ALL of that totalling under two thousand. This is however an investment. I know two grand may not sound like an earthshaking amount, but on the budget we live, it's no small feat to sock away even a hundred dollars a month.. Something always breaking, etc.

I have booked a couple of engagement photos and head shots, which will bring (with the savings of two years of these types of gigs!) enough to cover the cost of this. If photography is an art, I just got my first real set of brushes. Just plain excited, my old camera was beginning to fail. I get small shoots, but usually they are aware that I am unreliable at best. However, slow and steady wins the race, and after two years of ferreting away.. I've made enough doing headshots, puppies, and engagement announcement photos to pull off this upgrade. Feed the disease. Now I need to figure out what to start saving soda cans and snapshot money for. Actually I know already.. A quality telephoto for my nature shots. Almost as much for that one lens as it was to replace all that hardware!

Not really Arduino related I know.. Photography is my other passion other than Arduino. When I am sick, sometimes I can get my mind into a project or a shot, and shake the tendency to perseverate on the bad stuff. Gimped up again at the moment, so I'm gonna find something to do some macro shots of I think. My white moth orchid is in full glory, maybe that'll be the target of my distraction... If I can pull my crap together, the low light capabilities of this new kit will complement my LED photo strobe awesomely....

Just received another batch of stuff. I tend to just toss on a few extra things in whenever I have a few specific things to buy. So I got: some 16Mhz crystals and caps to go with them L386 op-amps, and some trim pots and resistors to use with them a handful of JFETs, also to be used with the L386 a 1-sided PCB -- yes, I'm going to try my hand at etching a couple rotary encoders a few hall sensors -- I have the magnets coming from Amazon, because it's way cheaper to buy 40 of them that way than a dozen from any electronics shop

Hoping the low-price ATMega chips are still a deal at Mouser, because I still need to get stuff to drive a little DC motor (got another thread going for that).

... it is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could somedayfacilitate a police state. -- Bruce Schneier

A Bought a Loads of stuff op-amps to ATmega8's to headers to connectors to GLCD 128x64 to Micro bump switches to optical distance measurer's and a TONNE of other stuff.

but recently just today i bought a NETDUINO that is of no comparison to our Arduino but still sports that design along with a ATmega328 TQFP package and 1 three RGB LED BAR and a FIO good healthy amount of bill.

Would you believe that I write test plan / result documentation during the day, and for a website at night? So, when I don't get monies I get lazy on the typing. <There I added a period and capped my sentences